I’ve wanted to start this discussion for several weeks, but wasn’t sure how to present Wagner’s argument. Fortunately Piotr has saved me the trouble wit a post at UD.

Piotr February 24, 2015 at 1:35 pm
Gpuccio,

Do you mind if I begin with a simple illustrative example? Let’s consider all five-letter alphabetic strings (AAAAA, QWERT, HGROF, etc.). By convention, a string will be “functional” if it’s a meaningful English word (BREAD, WATER, GLASS, etc.). Functionality is therefore not a formal property of the string but something dictated by the environment. There are 26^5 = 11881376 (almost 12 million) possible five-letter strings. The number of five-letter words in English (excluding proper nouns and extremely rare, dialectal or archaic words) is about 6000, so the probability that any randomly generated string is functional is about 0.0005.

Any five-letter string S can produce 5×25 = 125 “mutants” differing from S by exactly one letter. If you represent the sequence space as a five-dimensional hypercube (26x26x26x26x26), a mutation can be defined as a translation along any of the five axes.

It would appear that the odds of finding a functional mutant for a given string should be about 125×0.0005 = 1/16 on the average. In fact, however, it depends where you start. If S is functional, the existence of at least one functional mutant is almost guaranteed (close to 90%). For most English words there are more than one functional mutants. For example, from SNARE wer get {SCARE, SHARE, SPARE, STARE, SNORE, SNAKE, SNARK…}. Though some functional sequences are isolated or form small clusters in the sequence space, most of them are members of one huge, quite densely interconnected network. You can get from one to another in just a few steps (often in more than one way), which is of course what Lewis Carroll’s “word ladder” puzzle is about:

FLOUR > FLOOR > FLOOD > BLOOD > BROOD > BROAD > BREAD

You can ponder the example for a moment; I’ll return to it later.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/darwinism/the-elephant-in-the-room/#comment-550345

The whole thread is worth a look.

I might add that there is a rather crude GA at http://itatsi.com that does something not entirely unlike a word ladder.

http://www.opensciences.org/files/pdfs/Manifesto-for-a-Post-Materialist-Science.pdf

9. Studies of the so-called “psi phenomena” indicate that we can sometimes receive meaningful
information without the use of ordinary senses, and in ways that transcend the habitual space
and time constraints. Furthermore, psi research demonstrates that we can mentally influence—
at a distance—physical devices and living organisms (including other human beings). Psi research
also shows that distant minds may behave in ways that are nonlocally correlated, i.e. the
correlations between distant minds are hypothesized to be unmediated (they are not linked to
any known energetic signal), unmitigated (they do not degrade with increasing distance), and
immediate (they appear to be simultaneous). These events are so common that they cannot be
viewed as anomolous nor as exceptions to natural laws, but as indications of the need for a
broader explanatory framework that cannot be predicated exclusively on materialism.

10. Conscious mental activity can be experienced in clinical death during a cardiac arrest (this is
what has been called a “near-death experience” [NDE]). Some near-death experiencers (NDErs)
have reported veridical out-of-body perceptions (i.e. perceptions that can be proven to coincide
with reality) that occurred during cardiac arrest.

UD discussion link:

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/id-and-manifesto-for-a-post-materialist-science/

This is a little test of reasoning ability. I would prefer that for the first few days, only ID advocates post answers. These questions, and the underlying reasoning, are widely discussed on the internet, so you may have encountered them. If you have, I would appreciate knowing that fact. Also, for those who have seen them before, I would like to know how you did the first time you encountered them.

If anyone spots a typo or logical error, I’d appreciate hearing about is so it can be corrected.

The answers I’m looking for are in three parts:

First — yes or no — can the puzzles be solved by reason, assuming ordinary knowledge of the vocabulary. There are no tricks or unusual meanings involved.

Second, provide the answer.

Third, the provide the reasoning or proof.

Uncommon Descent frequently invokes logic and reason. this is a challenge to anyone who posts at UD. Feel free to post your answers on this thread or at UD.

Here are the questions:

1. [The original editor has been sacked. Re-Edited to straighten out the mess: The price of a cheeseburger is $2.20, the price of a plain hamburger plus the price of the added cheese.] A plain hamburger costs two dollars more than the added cheese. How much does a plain hamburger cost?

2. In Elbonia, one person in ten thousand has Ebola. A new test is so good that anyone who is infected will test positive. But three percent of uninfected people will also test positive. John, a citizen of Elbonia tests positive. What is the probability that John has Ebola?

3. I have a deck of picture cards. They have automobiles on one side and living things on the other side. I have looked through them, and I think they follow the following rule: if a card has a GM automobile on one side, it will have an animal on the other side. After shuffling, I deal out four cards.

Cat, Ford, Petunia, Chevy

What cards must I turn over to test my hypothesis?

4. William is tweeting Betty, but Betty is tweeting John. William is in love, but John is not. Is a person in love tweeting a person who is not in love?

5. Elbonia has invented a treatment for Psoriasis. During a recent blind test, of the patients who were given the treatment 197 improved and 95 did not.

Of the patients who were given a placebo, 45 improved and 20 did not.

Is the treatment effective?

Anyone here ‘skeptical’ of Dawkins’ ‘memetics’ and his notion of ‘memes’? If not, why not?

The Birth of the Messiah

Of course, a “true skeptic” denies that Jesus ever existed. If not, why not?

Merry Christmas!